Here are some insightful excerpts from, “Secret Cinema: A Gnostic Vision in Film,” a book by Wake Forest University English Professor, Eric Wilson:
http://www.voegelinview.com/secret-cinema-gnostic-film-pt1.html
Professor Peters, a clever writer and provocateur at The Front Porch Republic defines a ‘gnostic’ as an individual not very happy with reality. And, I like that definition very much, though it’s lacking in depth.
What has me pouring over my Stein is Voegelin’s comment in “The New Science of Politics” that:
“Gnostic movements were not satisfied with filling the vacuum of civil theology; they tended to abolish Christianity. In the earlier phases of the movement the attack was still disguised as Christian “spiritualization” or “reform”; in the later phases, with the more radical immanentization of the eschaton, it became openly anti-Christian. As a consequence, wherever gnostic movements spread they destroyed the truth of the open soul; a whole area of differentiated reality that had been gained by philosophy, and Christianity was ruined.”
The above strikes me as an explication or the denouement of (tensional movement?) evil in a derailed world-immanent reality, where that truth that addresses the question of the order of the soul is ‘repressed,’ and the spiritual effort as Voegelin says, is to destroy that order (soul). Perhaps, it is best understood as that pneumopathology, that infection of the spirit, that inhibits and interrupts and acts on the transition of the modes of being from potentiality to actuality revealed in the mode of ‘time and temporal existence.’ (See Edith Stein’s “Finite and Infinite Being 38-9).
I’m going to take Martha and go see M. Night’s latest, “Devil.”
“All creatures,” St. Edith writes,”have a triune structure as substances that stand upon themselves and that are filled with meaning and power. And all self-dependent structures pertain to a triune (body-soul-spirit) unfolding of their being.”
